As discussed, we had several primary focuses when it comes to AOM for this patch. Thanks to the community for keeping extensive lists of bugs and feature requests, you will definitely notice a few things in here from them. Let’s start with a number of bugfixes that have been made, in particular around some rendering issues. Those changes are as follows:

Rendering Improvements:

Siege Tower units now render shadows correctly.

Objects (like buildings) are now shaded correctly based on sun direction/rotation.

Sun rotation no longer affects ambient brightness

Frozen and petrified units now render correctly

Freezing and petrifying units no longer effects the player color for units of the same type.

Secondly, there were a number of game functionality or options that were frequently requested, as well as a few miscellaneous fixes for some edge case scenarios (who was disabling their sound card in game? :p )
Those changes are as follows:

Additional Options and Functionality:

Custom games are no longer ranked.

Titans (default/none) option has been added to single player.

Additional civ specific hotkey functionality has been added.

Events/Leagues no longer get stuck displaying “loading” text.

Disabling the computers sound card no longer crashes the game.

Okay, the last item is by far the most common issue requested to tackle. Since release there have been complaints regarding animation stutter in game, and while we have made a number of fixes across the board to help over the last year, our goal is still to get performance to a level that strengthens the multiplayer experience instead of being a troublesome point for players.

So with that in mind, we’ve been delving into the game system and animation system to determine what is causing the animation stutter as well as the ideal way to fix them. At its heart, animation stuttering is a side effect of network traffic and world speed issues between different players. As the world updates, I’m sending out network traffic – the faster I update, the more frequently I’ll be letting you know about those state changes – and the more traffic I’m generating. If another player is on a slower machine, their update frequency can drop lower than desirable and may have difficulty dealing with incoming updates. This can happen without people realizing, or as the game fills up with more units, etc. So for most customers they should see the following:

Multiplayer Performance Improvements:

Animation issues in multiplayer games has been improved.

Overall multiplayer performance has been improved.

If you’re interested in how some of this works, we have implemented a system that can identify slow machines and beginning adjusting their detail settings to improve overall performance for everything. The end goal is to keep everyone's world update rate at 30. If the world update rate drops below 15, that’s when we start to see animation stutter crop up for all players. The world rate will change through the course of a match, so we start by monitoring the update rates. As soon as it drops below 27 the player slowing down the global update rate is identified and a number of settings are adjusted on the fly to keep our world running smoothly. It’s important to note that if the world slowed down due to a big battle, after the battle it will rise again – this system dynamically will ramp the slow system back to their preferred settings once they’re back in the green.

How do the settings work? These are the adjustable settings that will go up and down based on current performance, and if your machine is slower you may have some already turned off. Most are based around reducing the main bottleneck for slower machines, the GPU.

Level 1: Reduce GPU workload by dropping frames. This will scale dynamically, in many cases a drop to 40-45fps solves it, but worst case would be down to 30 fps

About This Game

Age of Mythology

The classic real time strategy game that transports players to a time when heroes did battle with monsters of legend and the gods intervened in the affairs of mortals.

Use mythological creatures like Minotaurs and Cyclopes to bolster your armies' strength. Call upon the gods for assistance in flattening enemy towns with meteors or scatter opposing troops with lightning storms.

The Extended Edition includes:
Age of Mythology
Age of Mythology: The Titans
Golden Gift Campaign

While an old game now I still have fun jumping on it here and there and having a few games with friends of against the AI. For people who have yet to play this game, don't be put off by the mythological theme. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=353515238This is still a great game that will give you the same satisfaction that you have gotten from the other titles.

The campaign is fun and quite a lengthy investment. The expansion added campaign following the original is fantastic as well. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=353515278You can live without the dwarves focused one, while it has some fun ideas for maps it's short, easy and lacks any real depth . The main problem I had with these in the newest steam version was that the graphical quality seems to have been dramatically reduced.

The day and night cycle is over rated and really serves no point, if anything I found it broke the game up more and turned it off.

Multiplayer is fun but expect to play against strong players. Random AI matches are the same as before but with two new game types. They can be fun but I've always been a conquest or occasionally supremacy fan.

Overall it's basically the same game that it was in the past. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=353515262The steam community seems to have produced a nice array of new mods to enjoy and I've had fun revisiting this game once again. If you are considering repurchasing this game, wait for a sale and pick it up cheap, it's the same game. If you are looking at this game for the first time and enjoy similar games in the "age of" series you should enjoy this title and get your money's worth from it but it may seem a little dated at first.

you like vikings? you like prostagma? you like weird egyptian dialog you can't understand? you like titans? you like meteors? you like half life 3? you like rts? you like raging becuase you suck at rts?Look no further. this game has it all for you.

Action, great story, great gameplay, great mythical beasts, great heroes, great graphics that makes Tetris crap in it's pants.

Featuring some of your favorite waifus.Valkyrie, Amanra and the norse female Gatherer.What are you waiting for? for the pegasus? it's only 50 food and 2 favor!

AoM is very similar in the way that it plays compared to Age of Empire, and that's not a bad thing either since it plays very very well.

There is a huge amount of content available which will keep anyone entertained for probably ~100 hours, if not more. I have managed to power through the campaign in about seven hours, partly because I played this game to death when I was younger.

I haven't tried the multi-player out, and I suspect it will now be even more polished than before. This is a really strategy gamer's dream. Go out and buy Age of Mythology, you will not be disappointed.

Age of Mythology is one of the classic Real-Time Strategy games now released on Steam with a High-Definition make-over and a few tweaks here and there.

Pros:

+ Adequate Graphics+ Easy to Learn+ A lot to Master+ Lots of Units (Air, Water and Land)+ Different Civilisations (4 lots of 3)+ Civilisations have very different play styles+ Lots of different Civilisation specific units with their own unique specials+ Fast Gameplay+ UI is easy to understand and learn+ Stalemate Breakers (Titans)+ Balanced Gameplay (Each Civilisation has good and bad points ranging from economy to combat)+ Greater focus on Economy+ Randomly Generated Maps/Terrain+ Bots with varying difficulties and play-styles+ Small Details such as Day/Night cycles+ Great to play with others+ Runs perfectly on my machine (Sub-Par PC)+ Massive Re-playability+ Achievements and Trading Cards

Cons:

- Graphics could be better- Far too pricey for an old game (I'd get it on a sale if I were you)- Multiplayer is a bit buggy at times- Almost Identical to the old game with no changes- Online is relatively dead (Apart from the ~30 consistent players)

I like it; I really like it in fact! I was genuinely surprised about how much I actually enjoy this game and how much I will play of this for the days to come.

My Personal Experience:

Before I get into all of this, I should probably tell you that most of this pros and cons are compared to Age of Empires 2 HD which me and friends used to play before we got this game. After playing Age of Empires 2 HD for ages my mate decided to get us all a 4-pack and subject him further into his completely unnecessary debt that he had collected - regardless he made a good choice - Free Gayumes!

Age of Mythology - unlike Age of Empires 2 HD - is very driving, it actually has points of interest that you need to focus on, you're limited to 115 population after building all of your houses and in order to raise it you must then start making Town Centres on top of the Settlements that are strategically placed around the map. At first we were 'iffy' about these but after playing for about 20 minutes we realised they made the game far better than Age of Empires 2 HD was. The thing is, Age of Empires 2 HD isn't very driving, it's quite slow paced and the only real strategies are to either rush them early or build your economy up and attack them in one final push; basically you only really have one properly battle in Age of Empires HD but Age of Mythology on the other hand - you'll have many. You'll find yourself fighting over these Settlements purely for the fact that they give you 15 (+3 from an upgrade) which is enough to turn the entire game into your advantage. This allows for a snowballing effect which feels extremely fresh after playing Age of Empires 2 HD for so long. What I'm trying to say is that this game is better than Age of Empires 2 HD!

The Civilisations though - these are fun! You've got 4 main groups of Civilisations; Greek, Egyptian, Norse and Atlantean. Each of these have 3 counter-parts to them but there's no real point in me going into those, they have some differences but those in the same sub-groups are very similar to each other. The main point are the Gods though, each Civilisation has a total of 9 different gods which you have to choose from in tiers unlocking you God specific creatures such as Hydras and Manticores (Greek Myth Units - Myth are basically a type of Unit). This just makes up for so much customisations from your type of early-game economy build, to the overall God build you pick from, to the creatures you decide to fight with, to the buildings you decide to build, to the upgrades you decide to pick first, the list goes on and on - no doubt there's meta-builds somewhere though if you're that kind of person.

Like I said, the graphics are nice but there's no excuse for them not being better, this is 2015 and these graphics don't look any near that! When you compare it to the original is extraordinary but when you compare to other RTS games of this time... Oh wait... There are none...It still looks pretty good none-the-less though and you'll be spending most of your time zoomed out anyway to see what the hell is going on anyway so that's why I don't really see this as that much of a problem.

I've said all I really want to say about this game, I like it; I really like it in fact! I was genuinely surprised about how much I actually enjoy this game and how much I will play of this in the future.